Anthropic has allowed research teams at Stanford, Oxford and METR to analyze aggregate patterns from roughly 250,000 real Claude.ai or Claude Code conversations collected in April and May. The researchers chose their questions, while Anthropic ran them through Insights, a system designed to return grouped patterns without exposing raw chats. Stanford's SALT Lab found that over half the sample involved consequential tasks, meaning work that affects other people or is hard to undo. Legal and financial guidance appeared prominently. In nearly three quarters of collaborative conversations, users still set the direction and adapted Claude's output instead of accepting it verbatim.

Anthropic still controls the sample, privacy thresholds, analysis system and review boundaries. Outside researchers can ask independent questions, but the released datasets contain aggregate clusters rather than the conversations from which they were produced. Another researcher cannot inspect each label against the original exchange. Raw access would expose private lives. With no access, policymakers would remain dependent on company summaries. Anthropic's middle layer permits scrutiny while keeping the evidence inside its infrastructure. That arrangement gains weight as people bring contracts, money, professional advice and decisions affecting others into a chat box. Future researchers must submit an expression of interest, and Anthropic will decide who receives access and run the queries on their behalf.